Fullepub 
Chapter Twenty-One
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nature bends toward wickedness—consider the eclipse. The sky grows dark when it should be light, the moon overtaking the sun. Such is a time when dark power rises. But fear not, for even this can be used.
—The Book of Holy Law, Tract 7451
The trip through the short tunnel didn’t take long, but Lore was soaked to the waist by the time they splashed up onto the ledge at the other end, and walking through all that water had been taxing enough to make her break a sweat. She desperately wanted to wipe her face, but was afraid of what might be on her hands. “How often do you do this?” she asked, turning to Bastian. “And how in all myriad hells do you hide that much laundry?”
“It used to be once a week or so, but I assume I’ll have to cut back now that at least two of the betting enforcers know who I am.” Bastian sloshed up next to her, barely winded. “And I usually just leave all my clothes in the culvert and walk back through the gardens naked. It’s refreshing, and whoever finds my cast-offs certainly needs them more than I do.”
“Please tell me you aren’t planning to shuck off your clothes right now.”
“I’ll protect your delicate sensibilities, though it is sure to result in agonizing chafing.” Bastian grasped her by the waist and boosted her up, out of the culvert and into the Citadel gardens.
Right into Gabriel.
The Presque Mort stumbled back, arms closing around Lore to hold her steady. “You’re safe?” he asked, his hands running from her shoulders to her wrists. “He didn’t hurt you?”
“Should I be offended?” Bastian climbed out of the culvert, a smile on his face and daggers in his eyes. “I think I’m offended.”
“He didn’t hurt me.” Lore didn’t mention the endless moments in the alley when it seemed like he might. She stepped out of Gabe’s arms, peered up at his face. A bruise mottled the side opposite his eye patch, and blood crusted beneath a split in his lip. “What happened to you?”
“Ran into some enforcers who thought I hadn’t paid up a bet.” Gabe rubbed away a fleck of dried blood. It didn’t improve the state of his face. “Once I got away, I couldn’t find either of you, so I came here to get help from Anton.”
Of course he had. Lore wondered if Gabe had planned on telling the Priest Exalted everything, including the possibly reanimated body in the vaults, or if he would’ve left that out.
She wasn’t immediately sure. It made her eyes dart away from him, made her arms cross in front of her as if they could be a barrier.
Gabe didn’t notice. He rounded on Bastian, his fists held tight by his sides, like it took monumental effort not to drive one into the Sun Prince’s face. “What in all the myriad hells was that, Bastian? You drag us out to the docks to play at being common, get thrashed—”
“On purpose, I feel like I should point out.”
“—then kidnap Lore and leave me there?” He’d been advancing the whole time he spoke, and now Gabe stood right in front of Bastian, two inches taller and using it all to loom. “What the fuck?”
“Language, Your Grace,” Bastian admonished, completely unperturbed by the large mass of angry monk in his face. “I do apologize that you ran into trouble, though it seems like you fought your way out of it just fine.”
Gabe ignored him, seething. “You might be the prince, but you can’t just—”
“He knows, Gabe.”
Lore’s voice cut him off midsentence. Gabriel froze, then turned to look at her, shoulders stiff. “All of it?”
She nodded wearily. “All of it.”
Gabe mirrored her nod. Then he turned to Bastian and slammed him against the wall.
“Gabriel!” Lore snapped, but the Presque Mort was beyond hearing. His palms pressed against Bastian’s shoulders, his nose mere inches from the prince’s, teeth bared.
“So how are you going to kill us, Bastian?” he growled. “You know why we’re here, that your father knows you’re sending information to Kirythea, and I’m supposed to believe you’ll just let that go?”
Bastian’s neck was tendon-tight, but he laughed like this was a game. “They really got to you, didn’t they? Made you think the only way to absolve yourself of treason by association was to see it in everyone else.”
Gabe’s arms trembled slightly. Lore couldn’t tell if it was with the force of pressing Bastian to the wall, or with the restraint of not punching him.
“It’ll never be enough for them, Gabe.” Despite the wicked grin, Bastian’s voice was soft. “The Church and Crown don’t forget, they don’t forgive, not any more than the gods did before them. But they’ll keep holding it in front of you like a mirage in a fucking desert. And you’ll keep chasing it, even when you know it’s not something you can touch.”
They stared at each other. Then Gabe slammed him into the wall again.
“Both of you, stop it.” Lore gripped Gabe’s arm and pulled him back—for a moment, she thought he’d shake her off, but he relented, albeit reluctantly. “Bastian, shut up.”
Bastian shook his shoulders out, wincing. But he did shut up.
Lore turned to Gabriel, breathing hard, as if she were the one who’d been seconds from a brawl. “We can use this,” she said quietly, not looking at the Sun Prince as she did. It skirted too close to what he’d said in the tunnel, all these questions about using and being used. “There’s a good chance August is framing Bastian.”
The Presque Mort gave her a withering look. “Did he tell you that?”
“Does it matter?” Lore didn’t know how to explain that she knew Bastian was telling the truth, at least about this.
“You don’t know him.” Gabe shook his head. “Lore, Bastian is—”
“Has it occurred to you,” Bastian interrupted casually, “that you are basing all of your assumptions on me as a child? Seems unfair, to be honest. Especially considering how it went for you when people did the same.”
Gabe’s fingers turned to slow fists by his sides.
A moment, then Gabe straightened, his one eye flinty. “If you want to believe him,” he said to Lore, ignoring the prince completely, “we won’t go immediately to August. We’ll go tell Anton first and see—”
“No.” It came from Lore and Bastian at the same time.
Gabe’s brows rose.
Bastian pushed off the wall. “My father wants me gone,” he said, as if he were commenting on the weather. “I’m not eager to see what he’ll do if his plan to get rid of me legitimately—at least in the eyes of Auverraine—is upset.” He gathered up his long hair, wet with sweat and water from the culvert, and tied it into a knot at the back of his neck. “And there’s still the issue of villages dying overnight. I’d very much like to get to the bottom of that, personally.”
“You’ve still given me no reason to trust you,” Gabe said through his teeth. “You may have fooled Lore, but I’ll take more work.”
He said her name like an admonishment. Like he’d expected better from her. Lore tightened her arms over her chest, shame and anger kindling to an ash-taste in the back of her mouth.
“How about this for a reason, then.” Bastian drew himself up, somehow managing to look regal despite his bare chest and bedraggled hair. “If you involve my father and my uncle in any way I don’t want you to, I’ll have you both sent to the Burnt Isles.”
Lore couldn’t swallow her harsh intake of breath.
Gabe’s eyes darted her way, the stiffness with which he’d held himself slowly uncoiling. Finger by finger, he unclenched his hands.
“Fine,” he growled.
“Perfect. That’s settled.” Bastian grinned. “I suppose you two work for me now.”
But just because Gabe had given in didn’t meant he was going quietly. “So when exactly did you decide to take an interest in your subjects dying?”
“Gabriel.” Lore’s voice was sharp, but they were off again, though thankfully without violence this time.
“I’ve taken an interest since the beginning, Remaut.” Bastian dug in his pocket and pulled out another cigarette. Lore didn’t know how he’d managed to keep it dry enough to light, but it did without issue. He breathed out a cloud of smoke. “As much of one as I’ve been able to, since both Anton and August tried their hardest to keep me in the dark about the details.”
“Do you really need the details when you’re probably involved?”
“There’s an easy way for you to find out, Gabe.” Bastian stuck his hands in his pockets and grinned. “Why not just ask the corpse when we go to the vaults? That’s what Lore is supposed to be doing anyway, isn’t it?”
She thought of what happened this afternoon, when August had admonished her for asking questions of the corpse she’d raised instead of telling it to obey his orders. She hadn’t thought much of it then, but now she wondered why August and Anton hadn’t wanted her around when the dead started answering questions.
“I’ll ask again,” she said. “When we go, I’ll ask again.”
“Excellent.” Bastian ambled forward, casually strolling back into the manicured woods. The sky already looked lighter, the threat of dawn lurking around its edges. “If we have any further childhood traumas to work out after that, we can do it over breakfast.”
Inside the Citadel, the hallways were empty. Even the most dedicated of the debauched had finally retired to private rooms. Their steps echoed on the marble floor as Bastian led them back through the tangled warren of gold sconces and oil paintings and bejeweled statues to the narrow, unmarked door of the vaults once again.
The guard Gabe had incapacitated earlier was awake now. He stood at sleepy attention, the sharp end of his bayonet sagging slowly to the floor before he roused every few seconds and pulled it back up. His brow furrowed when he saw them coming, but when he recognized Bastian, he stood up pin-straight and inclined his head, apparently not discomfited in the slightest by the prince’s half nakedness. “Majesty.”
“Hail.” It was the most regal Lore had ever heard Bastian sound, not at all like he’d spent the last few hours getting beaten up on a dock. “I and my friends have business here. Lady Eldelore’s mother is in poor health and recently purchased a vault, with specific instructions that her daughter inspect its views at all different times of the day and night.”
Horseshit, but in that measured, princely voice, it sounded convincing. The guard’s face didn’t betray whether he bought it or not, but he nodded, opening the door behind him. “The Sacred Guard is still at his post.”
“He won’t be expecting us, but I’ll explain.” Bastian flicked his hand in obvious dismissal, and the guard stepped aside.
The three of them walked silently down the hallway beyond, still dark—no one had relit the candles after Bastian pinched them out. It made him a vague shape in the shadows, all dark hair and bare skin and bloody knuckles. He pushed open the door to the tunnel and waved Lore through with a bow.
Behind her, Gabriel snorted.
The Sacred Guard stationed at the end of the short tunnel said nothing as he watched them approach, but his grip on his bayonet eased when he saw the Sun Prince. Bastian didn’t wait for him to speak. “We have business here,” he said shortly.
The Sacred Guard nodded, though his eyes lingered curiously on Lore. He undoubtedly recognized her from earlier.
Fantastic.
But her mind didn’t have much room for worrying over the Arceneaux brothers and what they’d think about her going to the vaults with Bastian, or what they’d think about Horse’s reanimation when they inevitably heard. Lore could come up with something, lie enough to explain it away in a manner that would satisfy. Right now, she was too busy fighting down nausea at the prospect of seeing the child’s body again. At the possibility that he’d come back to some awful semblance of half-life, too.
“Lore?” Gabriel, soft and worried.
She shook her head, straightened. “I’m fine.” She set off toward the vault August had taken her to, trying her best to keep the tremble from her fingers. Above them, stars wheeled through the glass dome of the ceiling, the indigo sky streaked with fingers of lavender.
The opening in the side of the stone tower yawned like a toothless mouth. Bastian crossed his arms, cocked his head. “This the one?”
Lore nodded. She was pathetically thankful when Bastian entered first, ducking into the circular opening and disappearing into the dark beyond.
With one more look at her and a heavy sigh, Gabe ducked into the vault. Lore tipped up her head to the night sky through the glass, took a deep breath. Then she followed.
Her eyes adjusted slowly. Bastian stood between the stone Apollius’s outstretched hands, the cavity of the god’s chest positioned right behind him, like he was its missing heart. Gabe stood across from him, pressed into the opposite corner.
The child’s body on the slab was still. Relief made Lore weak-kneed. What happened with Horse must have been a mistake, maybe she hadn’t severed their connection fully—
But then, as if scenting her on the air, the body sat up.
The movement was unnatural. The corpse’s arms swung loosely as it bent at the waist, as if a string were attached to the head, pulling him up. The eyes opened slowly, black pits in the pale face, as the corpse slowly turned toward Lore. Like he’d been waiting for her to arrive, to give orders.
The weakness in her knees wasn’t relief anymore.
“Shit,” Bastian breathed. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.”
Gabe said nothing, but the very air behind her felt tense and cold, as if shock seeped out of him to infect the atmosphere.
It took her a moment to remember what she was here to do when faced with those black eyes. She needed to ask the corpse what had happened. She needed to ask it to tell the truth.
“What killed you?” she breathed.
The small mouth unhinged, a circle of black. It spoke without moving. “The night,” the child said, in a voice like a rockslide. “The night killed me.”
The four of them—Lore, Gabe, Bastian, the corpse—stayed still and silent. Then Bastian gestured to the slab. “See, Gabe? Told you it wasn’t me.”
Gabe shifted on his feet and ignored him entirely. “The night doesn’t help us much.”
Lore’s brows drew together, her concentration completely focused on the child in front of her. The mouth opened again, wider this time.
She expected an echo of the same message. But this felt different. The lips still didn’t move, the dead vocal cords still didn’t work. But there was a sense of effort this time. The corpse’s words before had seemed rote, a trained bird repeating what it’d been taught to say. This was… intelligent. Purposeful.
Like something else was using its mouth.
“Find the others,” the corpse said, the words rough and crawling from that dead throat, that dead and unmoving tongue. “They are not destroyed.”
She half expected the body to fall backward after the message was delivered, the purpose served. Instead, those black eyes still stared at her, mouth still opened, and Lore remembered why she was really here.
Whatever she’d done to reanimate this corpse, she had to undo it.
Half a heartbeat, then she reached out her hands, closed her eyes. All she could think to do was walk back through the steps she’d taken before, see if maybe she could reverse the flow of death. Send it in, rather than pull it out.
Around the slab, Gabe and Bastian didn’t move.
Instinct was all she had to follow here. Lore thinned that forest in her mind, loosening its protection. She took a breath, then held it until her vision began to white out, until everything faded to the muted gray of dead matter or the blazing white of something living. Gabe and Bastian were smudges of light, the body on the slab the color of charcoal—something between, something that should be dead, but with the death spooled out of it.
Mortem was easy to find—it lived in the rock, in the glass solarium above, slowly turning pink with incoming dawn. But it was hard for her to grasp, hard to get a handle on.
Bastian. Bastian was here.
Lore opened her eyes, fixed them on him. “Bastian. You have to go.”
Incredulity crossed his face first, then a blaze of rage. “Absolutely not. I thought we established that—”
“I can’t get a grip on Mortem while you’re here.” She was too tired to argue. Gods, how long had it been since she’d slept? “I don’t know why, but if I’m going to do this, I need you to leave the vault.”
To his credit, Gabe didn’t look smug. He didn’t look at Bastian at all, only at Lore, his brow furrowed. Channelers could see Mortem, but non-channelers couldn’t—they could only see the effects it left on a person. Gabe had seen her reach for Mortem, seen her fail to grasp it.
She watched him a moment, saw him hold his breath, his fingers go white and cold. Testing to see if he could grab hold of Mortem when she couldn’t. No dark threads attached to his fingers—he couldn’t grasp the magic of death when Bastian was around, either.
Lore couldn’t decide if that was comforting or alarming.
Bastian stared at her, not quite a glare, his arms crossed over his still-bare chest, his full mouth pressed into a white line. He nodded, just once, and stalked from the vault.
Gabe didn’t ask questions. Didn’t do anything but wait.
She was thankful for that. Lore closed her eyes, held her breath, lowered her mental defenses until she could sense Mortem again. She reached for it, twirled a thread of it around her necrotic fingers, her veins sludgy and blackened as her blood just barely moved.
The Mortem worked its way through her, death crowding her cells but not taking over. Slowly, it gathered in her palms, and slowly, Lore raised her hands and pushed it out.
It trailed across the vault, a viscous, dark line. It entered the corpse’s slack mouth, the gaping nostrils, the open black eyes. And as it did, the body slowly sank back down, the unnatural bend of the waist lessening by incremental degrees.
She fed death to the corpse and laid it slowly to rest again.
Lore slumped on the floor, pins and needles sweeping down her whole body as her blood quickened again, itchy and uncomfortable. Her breath heaved, her heart working overtime after tithing its beat.
Gabe came to her. Knelt before her, pulled her up by the shoulders, stared into her face.
“I’m fine,” Lore rasped, an answer to the question Gabe hadn’t asked. Not quite true, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “It worked, and I’m fine.”
The vault door opened, like Bastian somehow knew it was done. He walked in, stopped when he saw Lore and Gabe on the floor. He didn’t ask her if she was fine. Didn’t show any kind of concern.
Because he knows exactly what you are.He knew channeling Mortem was as familiar to her hands as their heartlines.
Light filtered in through the now-open door, dawn blushing the sky beyond the glass-domed roof. They needed to get out of here. She’d done what she had to do.
But Gabe didn’t move, still holding her shoulders, eyes moving from her face to the body on the slab. “What did he mean?” he asked quietly. “When he said find the others, that they weren’t destroyed?”
“He had to be talking about the other bodies from the villages,” she murmured, voice hoarse. She knew she was right, knew it with the same cell-deep awareness that pulled her to Gabe, pulled her to Bastian. “They weren’t burned. August and Anton are keeping them somewhere.”
Footnotes
1Earliest Compendium translation. Modern Compendiums have eliminated Tracts 690–821; these Tracts can only be found in Compendiums made immediately after being dictated by Apollius (1 AGF).
